War & Peace Quote by Kay Bailey Hutchison

The line works less as information than as permission: permission to reframe a messy, unfamiliar conflict as something the public can hold in one clenched fist. “Everybody in the world knows that” is a pressure tactic disguised as a truism. It turns 9/11 from a national trauma into a global, self-evident mandate, narrowing the space for dissent. If everyone “knows,” then questioning the next steps starts to look like bad faith rather than civic debate.

Hutchison’s key move is the phrase “a different kind of enemy,” repeated like a drumbeat. It’s deliberately vague, and that vagueness is the point. A “different” enemy can justify different rules: new surveillance, preemptive war, expansive executive authority, less patience for legal niceties. By admitting “it hasn’t been easy,” she signals empathy and realism, then uses that admission to glide toward an open-ended conclusion: adaptation is necessary, so extraordinary measures become common sense.

The context is early post-9/11 political rhetoric, when U.S. leaders were shaping public consent for the War on Terror and the architecture that came with it. Subtextually, “enemy” isn’t just a target overseas; it’s a category that can stretch. Once the adversary is defined by method (terror) rather than by state borders, the conflict becomes potentially permanent, because “different” is never fully knowable and therefore never fully defeatable.

It’s a compact example of how trauma gets translated into policy language: consensus asserted, complexity flattened, duration left conveniently undefined.